The birth of this Nation began with the ideal that all people were endowed with certain inalienable rights, those being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but since then we have fallen short of this promise more times than I care to admit.

"No taxation without representation" is more than a political slogan for the people of Washington, DC.; it is the cruel reality of their citizenship.

The District of Columbia has a fierce advocate in Congress who will never stop fighting for their representation.

It's not fair. It's not right. It's anti-democratic.

The correlation between the rise of xenophobic and racist rhetoric by President Trump and his Republican Party supporters and the dramatic and alarming rise in violence against Asian Americans is not coincidental.

As a Black man in America, I understand what it's like to be targeted because of how you look.

Whether the massacre in Atlanta was sex based or race based, it was hate based and directed at Asian women.

I have evolved on that issue, and we cannot create a vacuum of power in the wake of our absence that would destabilize the region and our rebuilding efforts.

By holding this hearing, we are taking a step away from the chaos and towards accountability.

We came so close to losing our democracy that day.

No reasonable person can in good faith compare what happened on January 6, 2017, with what happened on January 6, 2021.